Litvinenko had long-standing bitter feud with Putin, inquiry told

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/feb/02/litvinenko-long-standing-bitter-feud-putin-inquiry-told

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Alexander Litvinenko had a deeply personal and long-standing feud with Vladimir Putin, and months before his murder wrote that Russia’s president was a paedophile, the public inquiry into Litvinenko’s death has heard .

Giving evidence for the first time, Marina Litvinenko said her husband waged a vociferous political campaign against Putin after they fled Moscow in 2000 and moved to London. In one of the last articles he wrote, before his poisoning in November 2006, Litvinenko alleged that Putin was a paedophile.

The blogpost described how in July 2006 Putin bumped into a group of tourists in one of the Kremlin’s squares. He stopped to chat to them. Putin then lifted the T-shirt of a small boy and “kissed him on the tummy”, Robin Tam QC, the counsel to the inquiry, told the high court on Monday.

A photo of the encounter accompanying Litvinenko’s piece was shown to the inquiry. Its provocative headline read: “The Kremlin Paedophile”.

Litvinenko also wrote that after graduating from Leningrad’s KGB academy Putin – who spoke fluent German – might have expected a glamorous foreign posting. Instead he was given a relatively “junior position” because his bosses were aware of his tendencies, Tam said, quoting Litvinenko. Litvinenko offered no sources for the claim, Tam added.

“If you were going to make friends with Mr Putin this was not the way to go about it?” Tam asked Marina Litvinenko.

“Not at all,” she agreed.

Marina Litvinenko said this was one of the last articles her husband wrote. Four months later, two Russian agents – Andrei Lugovoi and Dmitry Kovtun – allegedly poisoned Litvinenko with polonium-210 during a meeting in a Mayfair hotel. Litvinenko sipped “three or four times” from a cup of radioactive tea, and died in agony 23 days later, the inquiry heard last week.

Asked by Tam, Marina Litvinenko confirmed that her husband had worked in Britain for MI6, the British secret intelligence service. She denied he was an agent but said he had been employed as a “consultant” from “about 2004” onwards. Typically, he had given MI6 information on techniques used by Russian organised crime gangs, she said. In return, MI6 paid him £2,000 a month. He also advised the Spanish secret service, she said, from late 2004 onwards.

The inquiry was shown the Litvinenkos’ joint bank account statements. In between entries for the congestion charge, Marks and Spencer, and Sainsbury’s, were regular anonymous monthly payments from MI6. Litvinenko also received a regular stipend from the oligarch Boris Berezovsky, his friend and patron, who had arranged his escape from Russia in October 2000.

Litvinenko was forced to flee, the inquiry heard, after blowing the whistle on corruption inside his own spy agency. Marina Litvinenko said that her husband had worked for a secret dirty tricks unit within the FSB, the Russian security service. He had been instructed to use violence against a disillusioned FSB officer, Mikhail Trepashkin, and was told to kidnap a wealthy Chechen businessman.

His immediate FSB boss then ordered him to kill Berezovsky, at that point a key player in President Boris Yeltsin’s court. Instead of carrying out the command, Litvinenko and a group of fellow officers tipped off Berezovsky. In autumn 1998 Litvinenko had his first and only meeting with Putin, the FSB’s new and virtually unknown chief.

The encounter was “unsuccessful”, the inquiry heard. Litvinenko told Putin about widespread corruption inside the agency, and its links with the Russia mafia. Litvinenko concluded that Putin had no intention of making any changes, Marina Litvinenko said, and concluded that Putin had also been “involved” in organised crime while deputy mayor of St Petersburg. “St Petersburg at that time was called the criminal capital of Russia,” she explained.

In December 1998 Litvinenko and four other FSB officers went public with their allegations at a press conference. Soon afterwards he was arrested. Three criminal cases followed, with Litvinenko released on bail after two unhappy spells in jail. He fled to Georgia and then Turkey, using a false Georgian passport, with Marina and their son Anatoly joining him there from Spain.

After a failed attempt to get asylum at the US embassy in Ankara, Litivinenko flew to Heathrow airport, telling the first policeman he met: “I’m a KGB officer and I’m asking for political asylum.” After seven hours of interrogation, Litvinenko and his family were released, with their application subsequently approved in 2001.

In the UK, Litvinenko wrote a series of anti-Kremlin articles. He also co-authored two books.

The first, Blowing Up Russia, claimed that Putin and the FSB were behind a series of devastating apartment bombings in 1999 in Moscow and two other Russian cities. About 293 people were killed. Litvinenko alleged his former agency carried out the explosions in order to create a pretext for a new, second war in Chechnya, and to win Putin – at this point prime minister – the presidency.

Litvinenko also claimed Putin had been a KGB informant while at university. His second book, The Gang from the Lubyanka, alleged that Putin had links with St Petersburg’s Tambov-Barsukov group, a powerful mafia gang. He further alleged that Putin had deliberately infiltrated Yeltsin’s inner circle to ensure that the FSB preserved its surreptitious political influence.

While in exile, Litvinenko became friends with a wide group of Russian dissidents, who helped shape his opposition to Putin, the inquiry heard. The included Vladimir Bukovsky, a Soviet dissident who lives in Cambridge, whom Marina Litvinenko described as her husband’s “guru”. He also became friends with the journalist Anna Politkovskaya – murdered in Moscow in 2006 – and the Chechen emigre Akhmed Zakayev.

Berezovsky paid Litvinenko a regular monthly wage and allowed the Litvinenkos to live rent-free in a Muswell Hill property. This salary was cut twice, however, in 2003 and 2006, forcing Litvinenko to look for alternative sources of income. This had caused Litvinenko some hurt, Marina Litvinenko said, while stressing that the two men still had a “very unique and special friendship.”

The case continues.